Featuring poetry and portraits from the young adult novel Kin: Rooted in Hope by Carole Boston Weatherford and her son, Jeffery Boston Weatherford, KIN reconstructs the Weatherfords’ ancestry across centuries: it moves from the American Revolution to the Maryland plantation where Frederick Douglass was enslaved, to Civil War battlefields, and the founding of all-Black Reconstruction-era villages.

Carole Boston Weatherford has written more than 80 books.Among her many accolades are two NAACP Image Awards, a Newbery Honor, the Coretta Scott King Award and four Caldecott Honors. She received the North Carolina Award for Literature, the Nonfiction Award from the Children’s Book Guild and an induction into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame. She lives in Maryland.

Jeffery Boston Weatherford is an award-winning illustrator who frequently collaborates with his mother. He earned his MFA from Howard University as a Romare Bearden scholar. A performance poet and fine artist, Jeffery has performed or exhibited in the US, West Africa, and the Middle East. He lives in North Carolina.

The exhibition will remain on view in the Calvert Gallery during Juneteenth and the Fourth of July. The adjacent Spitaleri Gallery will host a complementary selection of works by Elizabeth Catlett, Jacob Lawrence, Faith Ringgold, and local artist Darlene R. Taylor. These works share an interest in reclaiming and reconstructing an archive of Black history that is both public and deeply personal.